Jazz Words

August 26, 2006

Stop noodling with your axe and gimme a vamp on your doghouse, can you dig it?

To help translate this deliciously jazzed up sentence, drummer Brian Floody, a professional musician active in New York's jazz scene, graciously gave us this list of jazz-related words and their meanings:

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Comments from our users:

None of this matters if you don't have a GIG (a musical job -these days expanded to mean anyone's job.) Enough gigs may allow you to quit you're DAYJOB. But you can never be late for a gig or you'll miss the HIT (start time, akin to "downbeat" in classical music or "curtain" in opera and theater.) While the GROOVE and POCKET may be understood to refer to the physical feeling of the rhythm section's ensemble playing, Louis Armstrong (POPS) famously pointed out years ago that jazz itself should not (could not?) be defined, noting "If you have to ask [what jazz is], you'll never know." p.s. "Tubs" is such an arcane term that I took it as a stage name. SKINS would be more widely understood, though more square (or L - 7) from overuse, term for drums. --tubs

An additional meaning for hickory comes from my childhood when discipline was dispensed with a "hickory" meaning a long limber switch applied to the dancing legs of the disobedient child. Teachers and parents wielded these instruments. My mother kept one handy at all times for with seven of us someone was always in need of guidance.

Remember the little rhyme: "Readin' and writin' and 'rithmatic, taught to the tune of a hickry stick"

A "riff" signifies a guitar run of note (!) and has filled my woodshed for years. I am surprised that musicians have a vocabulary less replete than say, mechanics or golfers or roofers.
The beatniks had a great vocabulary of intimate words and phrases that should also be remembered.